Gerardo Fernández Noroña is a fairly prominent left-wing Mexican politician. He
was one of the founders of the
PRD, the third of Mexico’s three major parties, and later served as a congressional representative (running under the further-left Labor Party).

In recent years he has been challenging the legitimacy of Mexican elections,
saying that they have been tainted by widespread electoral fraud.
A couple of years back he issued a
call to the people of Mexico
encouraging them to rise up in a campaign of civil disobedience designed to
overthrow the current presidential administration of Enrique Peña Nieto.

Today is the deadline to file a tax return. Since I ended my term as a
Congressional Representative on the last day of
August, 2012, I have not had a formal income. For this reason, it would
follow that I submit a zeroed-out return.

However, I have decided not to do this, not to do it even if I had income and
contributions to declare. I have decided not to submit any return, in order
that I reject the government of scoundrels and traitors that you all lead,
which impoverishes the people and extinguishes our national resources.

To give them resources is to facilitate the surrender of the principal
national wealth that we have, which is petroleum. To pay them taxes is to
encourage corruption, impunity, injustice, betrayal, dissimulation, and the
ongoing deception that you all represent.

To comply with you is to be complicit in policies of impoverishment of the
people, generation of hunger, misery, and desperation for the majority of the
population of the country.

For these reasons, and many more I could add, I have decided to exercise
Civil Disobedience, refusing to file any tax return.

The threats and pressure that you may exert do not intimidate me. I hereby
challenge you to proceed legally against my rebellion, which will be
accompanied by further encouraging “Don’t Pay Taxes.” I hope I am able to
convince the people to stop everything in order to push for a Nonviolent
revolution that demands of them that they renounce and promote a profound
transformation in the country for the benefit of the majority of our people.

You go so far as to hide taxes in gasoline, in food, in drink, in tobacco, in
alcohol, and telecommunications, to state a few examples. You go so far as to
deceive the taxpayer, that you are able to hide tax payments and, of course,
you are even worse in hiding the decisions concerning public resources.

So that I will not pay you taxes on food and gasoline, I will not declare my
spending and I will fight to achieve the resignation of he who is your boss,
and with him, the entire gang of scoundrels that accompanies him and of which
you form a part.

I take this opportunity to send you a greeting, as this struggle does not have
a personal aspect.

101 years ago today, dispatches from
Britain covered the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement, which
was using arson and terrorist bombings in its campaign. Given this backdrop,
the tax resistance movement was billed as the relatively moderate alternative,
as these excerpts from the version picked up by the Victoria (British Columbia)
Daily Colonist show:

Tax resistance as a means of protest against the failure of the British
Government to grant woman suffrage is spreading throughout the country among
women who are reluctant to employ the more violent
Parkhurstian [sic]
methods. Following the recent “selling up” of household goods
belonging to Miss Beatrice Harraden, a distinguished suffragist and author of
“Ships That Pass in the Night,” at Kilburn, because she refused to pay her
income tax, scarcely a day has passed without reports of similar instances
from some section or other. Under the motto “No taxation without
representation,” the membership of the Women’s Tax Resistance League is
increasing by hundreds weekly.

Public meetings are being held in all the larger cities of the United Kingdom
under the league’s auspices, at which women are pledging themselves to pay no
form of tribute to the Government “until they shall have obtained a voice in
making the laws under which taxes are assessed against them.” Members of the
league in large numbers attended tax sales
today at Romfort, Islington, and Battersea
and paraded the streets afterwards with banners displaying their Boston tea
party war cry.

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